What?: The third and final album from Aphrodite's Child, a three piece 60's prog band with Vangelis on keyboards.
Why?: A few years back Classic Rock magazine came with a prog suppliment which listed 50 or so must-have prog albums. I went to YouTube (this was before Spotify) and listened to most of them, and ended up buying this, as well as The Pretty Things, KANSAS and Yes albums (but more on those much later).
Tell me more!:
Remembering back to my first listen of this, I had decided that "Four Horsemen" (the "hit" of the album) really was the only worthwhile track in the two-disc set.
During my recent re-listens I've grown to love this album... or at least, the first disc. It brings together so much of what I love: varied musical styles, instrumental proficiency, that beautiful early 70s "isn't stereo multitrack recording just amazing?!" production and a continuous doom-worthy satanic-end-of-the-world theme.
Much of the album could be described as pretentious, and certainly the spoken word songs ("Loud, Loud, Loud", "The Seventh Seal", "Seven Bowls") are a bit much by themselves, but they're short, and work very well making a coherent whole out of what is a set of very different songs.
The music is... difficult to describe. It's easy to just describe it as prog, but only in that it is so varied. Many of the songs, by themselves, aren't that strange, although others surprise with their oddness. "The Beast" could be a Goodies song, and it's followed by "Ofis", surely something left off a "Monty Python" disc? "Tribulation" wouldn't sound too strange at the end of a Zorn jam, "The Battle Of The Locusts" and "Do It" are pure 70s four piece Hendrix jams, "The Lamb" is exactly the sort of music you'd expect to come out of hippies visiting India in the late 60s, "Aegian Sea" sounds like a "War Of The Worlds" outtake, "Seven Bowls" is waiting to be used in a satanic horror movie.
The two big vocal tracks, "Babylon" and "The Four Horsemen", with Demis Roussos singing, are heaps of fun, and lure the listening into a false sense of security... with much of the rest of the album being the slow descending into hell and the beast rises... Although even the monotonous repetitiveness of "The Four Horsemen" hints at what is to come.
The best contemporary I could compare the album to would be Eyvind Kang, if he'd been born in the 50s.
It's easy to blame this album on drugs, although when many people talk about "trippy" albums I don't imagine this. I imagine terrible repetitive doof. However, of any album I've heard of that drug-music era, this one I believe. Particularly taking the second disc into account.
I love the first disc. It flows perfectly well, it's tells a great story of the coming apocalypse, the rising of the beast.
The second disc however wanders too much. The jams, while excellent, go on too long, the ideas repeat too much. What makes the first disc so great is the shorter jams, connected with the spoken word pieces. It's clear though that the attention span of the stoned listener is expected to be starting to get obsessive by the second disc. If they'd managed to stumble over to the record player to even put the second disc on, I expect they'd have stared at their speakers, open mouthed, while they watched the music swim around them...
To be completely fair it's mostly the almost 20 minute long "All the Seats were Occupied" that I hate (which goes as far as sampling large pieces from the first disc), and I'm really not much of a fan of "Infinity", the much spoken of orgasmic vocal performance of Irene Papas that saw the album almost banned.
I think I might make a version of this album removing those two songs and have another listen, to give the second disc a better go.
I highly recommend this, for hundreds of reasons. It's mental, it's fantastic, it's pretentiousness done right, with a humorous twinkle in its eye., and a dash of chemicals in its veins.
7/10
